Wednesday, May 9, 2012

In
November 2002, President Leonid Kuchma was advised not to attend NATO’s Prague summit, but he
ignored the advice and went. NATO changed the language used to allocate seats
for countries, using French not English, and thereby ensured Kuchma would not
sit next to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush. Kuchma
had become an international pariah following the Kuchmagate and Kolchugagate
scandals that revealed his alleged involvement in the disappearance and murder
of journalist Georgi Gongadze and the sale of military equipment to Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq.

In
May 2012 the 18th summit of Central European leaders in Yalta was cancelled – to be
rescheduled for a future date – after 13 of 20 invited leaders planned to
boycott it. The 17th summit held in Warsaw in May 2011 had been attended by
twenty heads of state and US President Barrack Obama.

Poland’s leaders opposed the boycott
although the opposition supported it (http://www.kyivpost.com/news/politics/detail/127101/;
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/nation/detail/126986/). Warsaw
was unable to encourage other Central European countries to attend except for Lithuania. Macedonia, Romania,
Slovakia, Moldova and Serbia also planned to attend,
making a total of only seven countries.

Thirteen
other countries boycotted the summit planned for the Livadia
Palace in Yalta
where three allied leaders met in 1945 to carve up post-Nazi Europe.
Of the thirteen, the country now leading the rhetoric in Europe against the
Yanukovych regime is Germany
(see below). The remaining twelve included Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia,
Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary and
the Czech Republic (which has granted two Ukrainian oppositionists asylum,
including Tymoshenko’s husband Oleksandr).

The
cancellation of the Central European leaders summit is the biggest diplomatic
embarrassment for Ukraine
since Kuchma’s snub at the 2002 NATO summit. A similar European boycott is
crystallizing around the Euro 2012 soccer championship co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, which is set to begin next
month. A growing number of European and EU leaders have stated their intention
to only attend soccer games played in Poland
and to boycott games played in Kyiv, Donetsk
and especially Kharkiv, the city where opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko is
incarcerated.

The
momentum for the double boycotts of the Yalta summit and Euro-2012 began to
gain ground following an international outcry over the use of force by prison
guards against Tymoshenko, the authorities’ refusal to permit her to travel
abroad for medical treatment and additional criminal charges launched against
her, including murder. Photographs of bruises on Tymoshenko’s body received
widespread international coverage as did the launch of her 19 day hunger strike
(http://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2012/04/27/6963597/).

Germany’s leadership of the European
boycott of Yalta
and Euro 2012 has fomented xenophobia in the insecure and paranoid Yanukovych
administration. In 2000-2005, Kuchma’s and Yanukovych’s xenophobia was directed
against the US, which was accused of being behind the illicit taping of
Kuchma’s office, orchestrating the Kuchmagate crisis, and conspiring in the
organization of the Orange Revolution to install Viktor Yushchenko to power. In
2004, the Yanukovych election campaign fomented the biggest anti-American
campaign in Ukraine
since the pre-détente Cold War (see EDM,
October 7, 2004).

Kyiv
policy makers have long complained of German opposition to Ukraine’s
admission into NATO and the EU. Yushchenko blamed Berlin
for opposing NATO membership while Yanukovych has blamed Germany for blocking the EU from giving Ukraine a
future membership perspective. In 2009, former National Security and Defense
Council Secretary Volodymyr Horbulin, who was then Director of the Institute of
National Security Issues,
told US Ambassador William Taylor, “there are two Russian embassies in Kyiv;
only one speaks German” (http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/03/09KYIV465.html).

Political
consultant Kost Bondarenko, who worked closely with Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy
Tihipko’s Strong Ukraine party until it merged in March with the Party of
Regions, has been a leading articulator of officially sanctioned Germanophobia.
Writing in the Kyiv Post, Bondarenko believes there is a German conspiracy
against Ukraine and that Germans see Ukraine as an “American creation” (http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/118004/).
Bondarenko and the Party of Regions hold a neo-Soviet conspiratorial mind-set
that is coupled with traditional eastern Slavic inferiority complexes vis-à-vis
the West (see my reply to Bondarenko at
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/118912/).

Segodnya, one of Ukraine’s best-selling newspapers owned by Donetsk oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, who has been close to
Yanukovych since the mid 1990s, published a scathing editorial of Germany last
Friday (http://www.segodnya.ua/blogs/korotkovblog/14371476.html). “Germany again wants to dictate its will over
Europe,” Segodnya wrote and, “They have taken off their masks and it really is
the case that the Berlin of 2012 is in no way
different from the Berlin
of the 1940s.” "Germany
has not changed in the past 70 years, and we are not just talking about the
geopolitical ambitions of [Chancellor Angela] Merkel and [Foreign Minister
Guido] Westerwelle.”

"In 1941,” the Segodnya
editorial continued, “the German administration forced naked Ukrainian girls into
goods wagons bound for Germany.
In the 21st century, German customs officials strip Ukrainian
workers naked and take their things away.” “Then, they destroyed countries with
armies, and now they ruin their economy. The calls for a boycott are a call to
leave hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians without work,” adding, “1945 taught
them nothing.”

“Germany
wants to establish its rules and dictate its will on today’s Ukraine. Even
the European Union counts for nothing if we are to be seen as sub-humans, as in
the New Europe of [Adolf] Hitler.” “We did not vote for independence [from the
Soviet Union] in 1991 to be under Merkel’s heel,” Segodnya proclaimed.

Germany was always lukewarm
toward the Eastern Partnership (EaP). The program’s main supporters were
Poland, Sweden, Great Britain and the three Baltic states, who saw the
Association Agreements (and enlargement-lite) as eventually leading to EU
membership for at least some of the EaP’s member countries (Belarus, Ukraine,
Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan). EU members opposed to European enlargement
for Turkey or Ukraine – such as Germany – now lead Europe’s rhetoric on human
rights abuses in Ukraine. The icy rhetoric has frozen the signing and ratification
of the EU’s Association Agreement with Ukraine. But, the primary responsibility
lies with Yanukovych (not Germany) for rolling back democracy and giving
enlargement-lite critics such as Germany ammunition to derail Ukraine’s
Association Agreement. Chancellor Merkel personally distrusts Yanukovych who
did not fulfill two promises he made to her that he would back
de-criminalization of articles used to sentence Tymoshenko.

Ukraine’s
international position is the weakest it has ever been since it achieved independence
in 1991. It took Kuchma eight years into his second term in office for Ukraine
to become internationally isolated while Yanukovych has accomplished this in
only two years. The country’s international isolation will grow further if the
October parliamentary elections are not recognized as “democratic” by the OSCE
and the Council of Europe. But the elections will not be judged as “democratic”
if Ukrainian opposition leaders remain in jail, which is highly likely (see EDM,
November 4, 2011).

Europe’s
“Ukraine problem” will grow
in 2013 when there will be growing vocal US and European demands for punishment
against Ukraine’s
authorities in the form of further boycotts, sanctions and visa denials. These will ironically take place during the same year that Ukraine holds
the rotating chairmanship of the OSCE.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Ukraine’s relations with the West have been dropping
below freezing in the last few weeks. Yulia Tymoshenko”s claim that she was
“beaten” as she was forcibly taken to a Ukrainian clinic have led her to
announce she is on a hunger strike. The authorities claimed this was all play
acting and showed a video of her allegedly walking around her prison cell. Her
lawyer claims the video is a fake (see video: http://www.pravda.com.ua/photo-video/2012/04/24/6963358/.

If this were not enough, from
jail, Tymoshenko continues to be a thorn in President Viktor Yanukovych’s side,
and if the authorities thought they could silence her by imprisoning her they obviously
under-estimated “Yulia.” As Der Spiegel wrote: “Tymoshenko, who is only 1.60
meters (5 feet 3 inches) tall but who is admiringly dubbed, even by her
adversaries, as ‘the only man in Ukrainian politics,’ remains a thorn in his
side” (http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,826417,00.html).
The Kyiv Post’s editor, Brian Bonner, adds: “Even in
prison while flat on her back, Yulia Tymoshenko can inflict damage on a
Ukrainian president. The woman who has helped demolish two presidents
politically – Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko – is on her way to
politically destroying a third one – Viktor Yanukovych.
The frail ex-Prime Minister is a human wrecking ball for all who get in her
way, despite prison guards and bars” (http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/126680/).

Therefore, her long interview in Ukraine’s
premier weekly merits a closer look (http://dt.ua/POLITICS/yuliya_timoshenko_z_hvoroyu_spinoyu,__ale_z_mitsnim_hrebtom-100889.html).
Tymoshenko is obviously well informed about current Ukrainian affairs and knows
what is going on outside her prison cell. She fully supports the unification of
opposition forces for the October elections in light of the threats facing Ukraine that she believes are worse than at any
time in Ukraine’s
last two decades. The authorities, she states, are making Ukrainians into
“losers without historical memory, without national pride, without positive
economic perspectives and [without] a European future.”

Tymoshenko does not believe the
unification of four opposition forces (the Batkivshchina party that she leads, Front
for Change led by Arseniy Yatseniuk, Rukh and Reforms and the Order party) will
lead to their absorption by her party and she supports each creating its own
faction and joining a parliamentary coalition. This strategy is a fundamentally
different approach to that of the Party of Regions, which was created from a
merger of five parties in 2001 and has absorbed five political parties since,
the most recent being Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Tigipko’s Silna Ukrayina
party. In parliament, the Party of Regions acts as a disciplined and united
party whereas “orange” forces have been fractured and discipline has been very
weak. Although Tymoshenko’s approach is more democratic than Yanukovych’s
monopolism, at the same time it has not proven successful in establishing
stable “orange” coalitions. The nine parties elected in 2007 in Our
Ukraine-People’s Self Defense, ballooned to fourteen parties by this year.

Tymoshenko laments that two
parties are fighting the elections independently – the nationalist Svoboda and
UDAR (Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform) led by international boxing
champion Vitaliy Klychko. Both parties believe they can independently cross the
five percent threshold to enter parliament, especially UDAR.

In calling for Svoboda to join
the united democratic election list, Tymoshenko is ignoring calls for the
nationalist party to be excluded from the opposition Committee Against
Dictatorship. An open letter by Ukrainian and Western intellectuals called for
the democratic opposition to distance itself from Svoboda (http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/125818/),
which cooperates with extreme right forces in Europe (see Svoboda leader Oleh
Tyahnybok’s congratulations to the French National Front on its performance in
the April French elections: http://blogs.pravda.com.ua/authors/tiahnybok/4f9528f14bbca/).
Despite disagreements with UDAR, Tymoshenko said the united opposition will
support Klychko’s candidacy in upcoming Kyiv mayoral elections.

The weakest aspect of Tymoshenko’s
interview, as more generally with the opposition, is intellectual and programmatic.
A US Embassy cable from Kyiv reported ahead of the 2007 pre-term elections that
“Personalities, not programs, Differentiate Three Main Parties” (http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/09/07KYIV2204.html).
Little has changed in the last five years. Tymoshenko, like President Viktor
Yushchenko, did not listen to Western election and political consultants –
including AKPD, used by Barrack Obama in the 2008 elections, who were hired by
her for the 2010 Ukrainian presidential elections.

Tymoshenko waffles through her
answer to a question about whether she supports a presidential or parliamentary
constitution for Ukraine
– a structural political issue of fundamental importance for any state.
Tymoshenko has supported both in the past – like all Ukrainian politicians.
Tymoshenko does not provide concrete policy ideas for the united opposition
and, as is typical for Tymoshenko, focuses nearly entirely on what she is
against - not what she supports.

Tymoshenko talks tough, which is
of course her style, although as The
Economist writes, “The damsel-in-distress tone, coming from someone who for
years was a tough player in the corrupt world of Ukrainian politics and
business, can sometimes grate” (http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2012/04/ukrainian-politics).
Tymoshenko states categorically that, “I will never permit anybody to transform
Ukraine
into a dark fatherland for the Cosa Nostra” but only outlines two ways in which
to prevent this. The first is victory by the opposition in the October
elections; the second is the outcome of two reviews by the European Court of
Human Rights (ECHR) of Yuriy Lutsenko, (see http://jamestownfoundation.blogspot.ca/2012/02/another-ukrainian-opposition-leader.html)
who was imprisoned in February, and her own case.

It is incredulous that Tymoshenko
remains so optimistic from her prison cell. From outside her cell it is obvious
that the authorities will ignore the ECHR (ironically on the eve of Ukraine taking
over the rotating Chairpersonship of the OSCE in 2013). Deputy head of the
Party of Regions parliamentary faction Vadym Kolesnychenko said the ECHR did
not have the ability to change court verdicts. “Its task is only to point out a
violation of human rights, which it believes was committed. However, it is not
a directive for Ukrainian courts” (http://gorshenin.eu/weekly/91_issue_15_84.html).

They will also never permit the
opposition to win the elections, in the sense of controlling a parliamentary
majority. National Security and Defense Council (NRBO) Secretary Andriy Kluyev
is to head the Party of Regions 2012 election campaign, ensuring the NRBO
provides state-administrative resources for the authorities. Free elections and
Yanukovych are like borsch and horseradish in that they do not agree with each
other. Since Yanukovych entered politics in 1997 he has presided over five
election frauds as Donetsk Governor (1998, 1999, 2002), Prime Minister (2004),
and president (2010).

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